Chapter 417: Before She Wakes.

We moved between them more carefully now, with the door close.

I stepped around a child’s shoe and did not look at where the other one might be.

I knocked.

Nothing came back from inside. No scrape of a chair. No breath against the wood that I could separate from our own.

"Azure."

"Bram."

Her voice arrived right against the grain, which meant she’d been standing at it for a while.

The door opened and I slid through. Code came after me. Azure had the latch turned again before either of us had fully faced the room; the click was small.

Sophia was asleep on the desk with her head on her folded arms. Dark hair spilled across the blotter. One cheek pressed to the wood. The rise and fall of her shoulders was slow. After last night she’d earned every minute of it.

Melissa was asleep too, tipped back against the chair with her mouth slightly open. The black dress had ridden up at one knee. A strand of white hair stuck to her lip.

Ingrid was awake.

Sitting upright, hands in her lap, spine not touching the chair. Something had come down over her face in the time we’d been gone.

"Did you bring food?" Azure asked.

"No."

And it landed on me as I said it.

Nothing had come down into that basement all day. The trays had stopped before dawn. Women had been sitting in locked rooms since then on nothing at all, and I hadn’t thought about it once because I’d stopped noticing my own hunger somewhere between the jump and the wall and Vince’s last breath on the asphalt.

"I thought that’s where you’d gone."

She went back to her chair and dropped into it. The frame complained once. Her pink hair had lost its shape; it hung in flat ropes against her neck.

I stayed standing with Code by the door.

We’d come up here to collect Ingrid, find the specimen, finish it, and come back. That was the whole plan and it had no food in it anywhere.

I turned to him and kept my voice down.

"We get them something to eat first."

"We don’t have that time." He didn’t bother lowering his. "That thing opens its eyes whenever it feels like it. Everything we’re doing right now is luck."

"Code."

"Every minute in this building is luck."

"Please."

He looked at me.

Then at the four of them. Then back.

"Fine." He put his hand out. "Give me the rope. I’ll go."

"We should both—"

"You’ll slow me down."

I handed him the coil. The web left my forearm cold where it had sat. He took the weight without comment, turned for the door, and nothing in his face thought much of any of it.

"Thank you."

I went after him.

He got the door open and slid out into the hallway. The few infected still standing there did not turn their heads.

"Code."

He stopped and turned without saying anything. The bag of the web hung against his hip.

"One more favour."

He waited.

"The girls on the other side haven’t eaten either."

He looked at me for about two seconds. The calculation moved behind his eyes.

Then he turned and walked toward the balcony.

I shut the door and turned back into the room.

"He’ll be a few minutes."

Azure said something into the arm of her chair that I didn’t catch.

I crossed to Ingrid.

The floor was scuffed under my boots. The window with the iron lattice still holding the view of a street full of statues.

"Hey."

"I know," she said.

I stopped.

"I know he’s dead. I watched all of it from that window."

Her voice was level. The hands in her lap had not moved. The bald head caught the weak light from the dead terminal’s standby glow and gave nothing back.

I went down into a squat beside her chair. There wasn’t another seat in that room and I wasn’t going to stand over her. My neck still held the ghost of Vince’s teeth.

"I’m sorry."

"It isn’t anybody’s fault." Her eyes stayed forward. "I knew he had to die. He’d gone too far and he was never coming back from it. In Goth we say what climbs is looking for a fall."

I didn’t have anything for that.

She was handling it and she was failing to handle it in the same breath.

I can’t ask her now.

Not tonight. Not twenty minutes after she watched it happen.

"I knew he was going to die," she said. "I’ve known for days. And I knew it would hurt when it came, because Max wasn’t a bad person."

That man was the most dangerous thing I have ever stood next to. Good riddance to all of him.

Melissa, from a chair with her eyes shut. The thought arrived.

"So why are you here?" Ingrid turned her head and looked at me properly for the first time. The eyes found mine and held. "You want to ask me something."

I glanced at Azure, half asleep in her chair.

"I want to end the infection."

"You need the first patient."

"Yes."

"Okay." She put both hands on the arms of the chair. The motion was practical, already rising in the shoulders before the legs committed. "Let’s go."

She didn’t make me work for one part of it. No argument. No demand for the full story. Only the acceptance of someone who had been waiting for the next useful instruction.

"We wait for Code."

"Fine."

She sat back. The hands returned to her lap. The face closed again over whatever was moving underneath it.

A single knock on the door.

I got up, crossed the room, and opened it.

Code came through with a bag in his hand. The web was gone from his arm; whatever he had done with it between the balcony and the food was finished.

The bag was plain, heavy enough that the bottom pulled against his grip. The smell that came in with him was grease and bread and something warm that had no business existing in a building that had spent the last hour trying to end itself.

I shut the door behind him. Somewhere in the city a girl’s eyelids had not yet opened.